[Peace-discuss] burbules1954@yahoo.com

[David Green]

I just love the way Bush has to present Roberts as
working at a steel mill during summers in high school
in order to save money for college, as if he were
working class. Of course, it helps to get these jobs
(probably a hard job to get by the 1970s) when your
father owns the mill. Here's the context, from the
NYT:

Born in Buffalo, Judge Roberts arrived in Long Beach,
a flag-bedecked town of 1,500 residents on the shore
of Lake Michigan, around fourth grade with his parents
when his father, John Sr., helped open the Bethlehem
Steel mill in Burns Harbor, a half-hour's drive away.
At first the family - John and his three sisters,
Cathy, Peggy and Barbara - lived by the lake amid the
summer cottages of wealthy families from Chicago,
about 60 miles away. But in 1965, the family built a
brown split-level house with five bedrooms on a quiet
street a couple of blocks away.

Like other steel executives' children, John Roberts
went to private school, first next door to his
family's parish at Notre Dame, and then to an all-boys
boarding school, La Lumiere, a bucolic retreat on a
pond in nearby LaPorte.

Besides being an academic star, he was a scrappy
athlete, a captain of the football team despite his
mediocre play, and competed in wrestling and track. In
a small school of about 125 students, John Roberts was
also on the student council executive committee (he
lost the race for senior class president to his best
friend), the student activities committee, the
editorial board of The Torch student newspaper and the
drama club.

The school yearbook from 1972, his junior year, shows
he played Peppermint Patty in the production of
"You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown."

He impressed almost everyone. Lawrence Sullivan, his
high school math teacher, recalled on Wednesday, "It
became very, very clear and evident when he first came
here that he was a person who was destined to do big
things." 


A Gift of Persuasion


Though Judge Roberts at first aspired to be a history
professor - a former roommate said he chose Harvard
over Amherst intending to combine undergraduate work
with a Ph.D. - he showed early signs of the skills
that would serve him so well as a litigator.

"The English teacher used to talk about his papers
after he had written them because they were outrageous
but very well crafted," remembered John Langley, an
emergency room doctor in New Orleans who was a class
below Judge Roberts at La Lumiere. "He could take an
argument that was borderline absurd and argue for it
so well that you were almost at the point of having to
accept his stance even though it was intuitively
obvious that it was absurd."

Few people remember him or his parents having much
interest in political activity, though Mr. Sullivan
said "he had a conservative bent," in contrast to the
faculty at La Lumiere.

Asked how her son became a solid conservative,
Rosemary Roberts said, "I don't know, only God will
know," but she said her son's views are shared by
other family members.

The elder Robertses now live in a golf-course
community in Ellicott City, Md., near Baltimore, and
she recalled: "We were very concerned about the news
and everything. We have always been a family that was
interested in things other than ourselves."

In his senior year, in David Kirkby's Morals class,
John Roberts went beyond a simple book-report
assignment to pore through a dense set of seven
philosophy tomes, then proceeded to hold forth for
several class periods while some of his classmates
struggled to fill a few minutes. "If bells hadn't rung
to end the class, he could probably be still talking
now, 32 years later," Mr. Kirkby said, laughing, on
Wednesday.

Tenacity was a hallmark on the football field too.

"He wasn't that big, he wasn't that fast, but he
wasn't bashful about butting his head against guys
three times his size," said Bob MacLaverty, who beat
John Roberts in that student council election, but
remained close enough friends that they stood at each
other's weddings. 

John Roberts and John Langley worked summers at the
Burns Harbor mill - on the floor, not in offices, like
their fathers.

"They were down-and-dirty jobs, but they paid well,
and the kids had to learn how to take a riding from
the regular employees who were not going to college,"
recalled Mr. Langley's mother, Joan.




		
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